Hungarian FM: Global health-care cooperation must be totally depoliticized
Change language:
Global health-care cooperation must be totally depoliticized in order for the world to be better prepared for a potential future pandemic, the Hungarian foreign minister said at a United Nations’ General Assembly meeting in New York on Wednesday.
The ministry cited Péter Szijjártó telling a high-level meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response that the coronavirus pandemic had demonstrated “how defenseless we are regardless of all our super highly developed technologies and artificial intelligence at our disposal”.
“Unfortunately, we cannot give back the lives of those hundreds of thousands who have died … but we do have to draw and understand the conclusions in order to be more protected in the future,” he added.
“One of these lessons we have to learn is that all those strategic capacities might look like useless under normal circumstances, but under emergency circumstances they can save lives,” Szijjártó said.
Hungary is building its own vaccine factory, and is now able to produce masks, gloves and ventilators as well, and has its own air cargo delivery capacity, he added.
He expressed hope that as a consequence of COVID, everybody understands that “human health has nothing to do with geopolitics. Virus does not know any borders, any ideologies, any political affiliation”.
To be better protected, the world must come to an era of real global cooperation, which is not being limited, restricted or influenced by global politics, he said.